Article

Finding out space used/free space on iPod

By Kirk McElhearn ● Friday, March 11, 2005

Ask iLounge offers readers the opportunity to get answers to their iPod-, iPhone-, iPad-, iTunes-, or Apple TV-related questions from a member of the iLounge editorial team. We'll answer several questions here each week, and of course, you can always get help with more immediate concerns from the iLounge Discussion Forums. Submit your questions for consideration using our Ask iLounge Submit Form. We reserve the right to edit questions for grammar, spelling, and length.

Q: How can I find out how much music is on my iPod and how much free space is left?

- Henry

A: There are two ways to find this out. The first is to connect your iPod to your computer, open iTunes, then select the iPod in the Source list. If you look at the bottom of the iTunes window you’ll see the number of songs, the amount of time used, and the amount of space used. You’ll also see a progress bar showing the amount of space used and the amount of free space.

On the iPod itself, you can choose Settings > About, then see the number of songs, the capacity, and the available space.

Note that if you have set your iPod to work as a storage disk, you can check in the Finder (Mac) or the Windows Explorer to see how much free space your iPod has.

Kirk McElhearn is the author of several books including iPod & iTunes Garage. His blog, Kirkville features articles about the iPod, iTunes, Mac OS X and much more.

Comments

1

I was under the impression that track volume adjustments were not used by the shuffle. Is that not correct?

Also, sometimes it seems that iTunes can lose track of where a file is even if it’s not moved/renamed/unavailable. Things go back to normal if you point it to the original file. Actually, this doesn’t seem to happen as often as it used to, and the bug may even have been fixed.

Posted by mattwardfh on March 11, 2005 at 9:33 AM (CST)

1

For the question about the low volume when useing a tape adapter. Try reversing the dirrection of the tape. So if its playing side B switch to A and vise versa.

Burn

Posted by digitalburn on March 11, 2005 at 11:41 AM (CST)

1

My ipod keeps turning itself on and runs itself down with or without aerphones plugged in. And when i stop it and press menu, it shows a blank screen and you scroll up and down but all you see are arrows but the rest is blank. help me

Connor

Posted by conzz on March 11, 2005 at 12:23 PM (CST)

1

In regards to printing a song list from the ipod… put the ipod into MANUAL mode in the iPod options tab, select your ipod from the source list, Go to File, Print (I use the Windows version of iTunes, so it may be different for the Mac version), select SONG LIST from the radio buttons there, and voila… you have your iPod song list…

1

It creates an HTML page with all of the info, including total albums, size, etc. You can then print that page.

Posted by Kloan on March 11, 2005 at 4:16 PM (CST)

1

Regarding: “! icon” and “songs weren’t transfered”:

Possibly music is in a format not recognized by iPod. Select it in iTunes, and go to Advanced—>Convert selection to aac/mp3 or whatever. Kill oringinal if so chosen.

Posted by iPod Dance on March 11, 2005 at 11:08 PM (CST)

1

Regarding: “! icon”

Is there any way in iTunes to group/order my songs by those that have that icon. That way I can fix ‘em all easily.

With 5000 songs it’s hard to scroll through the listing just to find that icon.

Posted by Wayneo on March 12, 2005 at 6:16 AM (CST)

1

To print a song list you can also select all the songs in the current song pane in iTunes and copy and then paste into Excel or any text editor. You can decide which info to include by selecting which columns to display in your iTunes song window. Right click on the top of the song list and left click to select or clear the columns.

Posted by mtully on March 12, 2005 at 2:10 PM (CST)

1

Thanks for the tip on finding songs that come up with the (!). I had a couple doing this, and I found that I had deleted them from my drive, but not from iTunes. After re-downloading them, I was able to easily fix the problem.

Posted by GC Rider on March 13, 2005 at 10:06 AM (CST)

1

A correction to the printing question: you actually can select your iPod and then select File > Print to print out a list of its contents. You can choose from the many print options (song list, album list, etc.) Sorry I hadn’t spotted that; I think this feature was added recently - it wasn’t available for iPods before.

If your version of iTunes won’t print, update to the latest version.

Posted by Kirk McElhearn on March 31, 2005 at 3:49 AM (CST)

1

im looking into buying an ipod mini but with all the negative attention from this site (by the way im a pc user) is it really worth it? I mean the other options are always mp3 players which are WAYY cheaper to buy and download songs for..whats the point?

Posted by kabbs on April 5, 2005 at 3:21 PM (CDT)

1

I have an a 4g Ipod, but also ended up buying the Ipod Shuffle. I am planning to go on a trip and I am not planning to bring a laptop. Is there anyway to charge my shuffle using my Ipod power adapter? Is there a cord that is one end firewire and the other end usb?